Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “Not as an agency, no.”

  “But some maverick, rogue element?”

  “Some type of maverick element, yes.”173*

  But if the CIA, or rogue elements thereof, were responsible for Kennedy’s murder and trying to frame Oswald for it by alleging he was a Castro or KGB agent, why wouldn’t they want people to see the very evidence (the alleged suppressed photographs of Oswald at the Cuban consulate or Soviet embassy) that could help them do it? Since it would be to their advantage to show Oswald’s connection with these people, instead of concealing these photographs, wouldn’t they be passing them out on street corners for the world to see?

  There’s a footnote to the weightless allegation that someone was impersonating Oswald at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. The Mexico City office of the CIA cabled CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,* on October 9, 1963, that on September 28 and October 1, an “American male who spoke broken Russian” and who identified himself as Lee Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy, speaking once to Consul Valeriy Kostikov and once with Soviet guard Ivan Obyedkov, asking the latter if any messages had been received for him at the embassy, and being told there hadn’t been. The cable goes on to describe the American male, whom Mexico City believed was “Lee Oswald”: “Apparent age 35, athletic build, circa six feet, receding hairline, balding top, wore khakis and sport shirt.”174 When the CIA’s photographic surveillance of the embassy picked up an American-looking male entering the embassy around the same time, the staff erroneously assumed, David Phillips told me, that it was a photo of Oswald, whom they did not have a photo of in their Mexico City files.175 The reason they assumed the man was Oswald was that they knew from a tape-recorded phone conversation and the transcript of it that Oswald was a North American, and from their photograph surveillance during the same period of time there was just one person who appeared to be North American. All the rest were Latin.176 As Phillips describes the gaffe in his book, The Night Watch, his office had “put one (Oswald, seeking a visa from the Soviets) and one (an unknown visitor to the Russian Embassy) together and come up with an incorrect two: the assumption that the two men were the same.”177†

  Upon receiving the October 9 internal cable at Langley, Charlotte Bustos, a twenty-six-year veteran CIA employee working the “Mexico desk” at headquarters, requested a “name trace” on Lee Oswald, and she received Oswald’s 201 file, where his name was listed as Lee Henry Oswald. Afer reviewing Oswald’s file, she sent out a cable (telegraph) on October 10 to three federal agencies (Department of State, FBI, and Department of Navy) passing on the information in the October 9 internal CIA cable, and adding that “Oswald may be identical to Lee Henry [sic] Oswald, born on 18 October 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana, a former U.S. Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and later made arrangements through the United States Embassy in Moscow to return to the United States with his Russian born wife, Marina Nikolaevna Pusakova [sic], and their child.”178

  The CIA memos between the CIA station in Mexico City and CIA headquarters, where the staff is trying to figure out who Oswald is and what he looked like, by themselves show that Oswald obviously had no connection with the CIA. These weren’t memos by the CIA to the outside world, but internal memos, that is, within the CIA. When Charlotte Bustos, who sent out the aforementioned memo and another on the next day, was asked in her testimony before the HSCA, “Do you have any reason to believe that Oswald had any type of relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency?” she responded, “No, none whatsoever.” “When you had access to Oswald’s 201 file you saw no indication in there that he had any type of relationship with the Agency as an agent, source, asset, et cetera?” “No, none whatsoever. There certainly would not have gone out all this cable traffic if anybody along the way had known he was an asset. You would not have gone out with [name] traces and things.” “If he was an agent would you have notified the Mexico City station?” “Yes.” “Would that normally be done as a matter of standard operating procedure?” “Yes. Then somebody would be very upset that [there] was an agent in Mexico without telling the [Mexico City] Chief of Station because the Chief of Station is responsible for all operational activities in his area.”179

  The person described as Oswald in the Mexico City memos (his identity to this day is not known) is shown in a photo in the photo section of this book.180 As can be seen, he bears no resemblance to Oswald in face or physique.*Yet unbelievably, even though someone attempting to impersonate Oswald would have to bear at least some resemblance to him, several conspiracy theorists aren’t willing to accept the matter as a simple case of mistaken identity. Anthony Summers, in his book Conspiracy, smells a CIA cover-up: “The CIA did not reveal [to the Warren Commission that the man] had also been at the Soviet Embassy on October 1, the date of an ‘Oswald’ contact with the Soviets.” He goes on ominously: “Who was this mystery man, anyway?”181 John Davis, in his book Mafia Kingfish, and Jim Garrison, in On the Trail of the Assassins, also suggest the man in the photo was impersonating Oswald.182† Peter Dale Scott, after writing that the man in the CIA photos is “heavyset, balding, and middle-aged,” nonetheless remarkably goes on to agree with most of the critics that the man was not Oswald but an imposter.183 The conspiracy theorists are so unhinged that they believe Oswald’s framers would use an impersonator who looks as much like Oswald as Danny DeVito does.

  The allegation that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City is completely devoid of merit. The Warren Report concluded that it was Oswald, not an imposter, in Mexico City.184 Likewise, the HSCA, though acknowledging that there were “unanswered questions” about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, said that “the weight of the evidence supported the conclusion that Oswald was the individual who visited the Soviet Embassy and Cuban Consulate.”185

  The Second Oswald allegation, like virtually all the allegations by the conspiracy theorists, is ludicrous on its face and goes nowhere. As the Associated Press reported from a review of FBI records in December of 1977, “When Oswald was identified as the suspect and his picture was flashed around the world, people from one end of the country to the other called their local FBI office to report seeing Oswald in their neighborhood in the preceding weeks.”186 This phenomenon would particularly pertain to someone like Oswald, whose features were so common. Even when someone is dead, like Elvis Presley, people continue to swear they’ve seen him. (“I have seen Elvis in the supermarket. Once he gave me a wink as if to say, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ Several people in Kalamazoo know where Elvis lives, but they respect his privacy and are protecting him from the media,” wrote someone to Ann Landers.)187* Take the case of someone who, to put it indelicately, looks like no one else: Michael Jackson. When Jackson, amid allegations of child molestation, called off the remainder of a tour in November of 1993 and went into hiding, “Jackson sightings were reported around the world. A Jackson look-alike stirred paparazzi in London, a hotel operator in the French Alps announced that the singer was staying at his resort, and a local newspaper in Connecticut quoted an ‘impeccable source’ who said Jackson was recovering at a nearby drug treatment center. All these reports were false.”188

  Conspiracy theorists are well aware of this syndrome; yet, starving for any morsel at all that will feed their obsession, they have seized on almost every one of the Oswald sightings, virtually all of which, even if true, don’t intelligently advance any argument, much less a conspiratorial one.

  David Lifton and Alteration of the President’s Body

  There have been so many preposterous theories about the Kennedy assassination that it’s hard to say which one is the most far-out. One theory that perhaps “takes the cake” is set forth by conspiracy author David Lifton in his book Best Evidence. The theory is so unhinged that it really doesn’t deserve one word in any serious treatment of the assassination. The only problem is that it comes wrapped in a hefty 747-page book, which was published in 1980 by a prominent publisher (Macmillan), was treated seriously by many peo
ple who should know better, got excellent reviews in several major newspapers, was a Book of the Month Club selection, and was on the New York Times best-seller list for three months, rising as high as number four. Therefore, I am forced to devote some time to talking about nonsense of the most exquisite nature.

  At the time of the assassination, Lifton, age twenty-four, was attending UCLA to get an advanced degree in engineering. To support himself he worked nights as a computer engineer at North American Aviation. What set him off on what would become a lifetime obsession,* causing him to eventually quit school and his job and borrow money from his parents so he could pursue shadows of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, was a Mark Lane lecture he attended in Los Angeles in 1964.1 Before he left UCLA in 1966, he sat in on a course on the Warren Commission taught by former Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler. The law professor and Lifton became friendly adversaries, but when Liebeler learned that Lifton actually intended to write a book on the theory he had come up with, he told Lifton, “I don’t think that anybody will ever believe anything you say.”2 Liebeler was wrong. Many have. The good professor failed to take into account that reason only visits those who welcome it.

  Lifton is a confirmed grassy knoll devotee. He believes the deadly shots came from there as opposed to the Book Depository Building, where Oswald was. But the conspirators, to frame Oswald, somehow got a hold of the president’s body, per Lifton, between the time it was at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the time it arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy, spirited it away to a place where the bullet wounds to the president were altered to make it look like the shots came from the rear (where Oswald was, not the right front, where the triggerman for the conspirators supposedly was), and then returned the body to the presidential party, all without anyone having any inkling of what had taken place. No self-respecting author of suspense novels would be bold enough to float a theory like this. But then again, Lifton would probably say, this isn’t fiction, it’s real.*

  More specifically, knowing that bullet entry wounds are smaller than exit wounds, Lifton says the plotters enlarged the wound in the throat (ignoring the fact that the tracheotomy at Parkland had already done that) and the wound to the right side of the president’s head to make them look like exit wounds, when they were really, per Lifton, entry wounds. Believing that the two bullets that he says entered the president’s body from the front did not exit his body, and believing further that the president was not shot from the rear, Lifton said the back side of the president originally had no wounds of any kind. So the plotters, he said, “created” two “false…entry” wounds to the rear of the president, one in his upper right back and one in his upper right head to make it look as if Kennedy was shot from the rear. Lifton doesn’t say if the plotters fired two rounds into the president’s corpse or created the two holes some other way.3 But if they “created” the two wounds in some other way, he doesn’t say how the three autopsy surgeons and every other pathologist, including the nine forensic pathologists on the HSCA medical panel, all concluded that the two wounds to the back side of the president were caused by bullets.

  Lifton believes that only the plotters know what type of rifle and bullets were used to kill Kennedy, because when the conspirators had possession of Kennedy’s body, they removed the real bullets that killed him so they would never reach the FBI lab. What about the fragments of one bullet found inside the presidential limousine, and the whole bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital, each of which was determined to have been fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle? Per Lifton, the plotters planted them there. But how did the plotters come into possession of Oswald’s rifle? Lifton doesn’t say, but apparently they somehow found out where it was—on the garage floor at Ruth Paine’s house—and broke into the garage and stole it. Later, he suggests, they fired it twice at some undisclosed location, retrieved the two bullets, smashed one of them into several fragments, then planted these fragments in the limousine, as well as the whole bullet at Parkland Hospital, and Oswald’s rifle itself on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building.4

  Since Lifton’s theory not only presupposes but requires Oswald’s total innocence, how does Lifton handle Oswald and the warehouse full of evidence pointing to his guilt? Simply by ignoring both, for the most part, in his book. Out of his 747 pages, he unbelievably devotes no more than 6 or 7 full pages, if that, to Oswald. He dismissively treats Oswald almost like an afterthought, not even mentioning, for instance, his attempted murder of Major General Edwin Walker, and devoting only one sentence to Oswald’s murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. I understand. There wasn’t room in his book for such trivia.

  Getting back to Lifton’s theory, is it a legitimate question to ask why didn’t the plotters, instead of firing the deadly bullets from the president’s right front (grassy knoll) and then, to frame Oswald, engage in the absolutely impossible task of stealing the president’s body to remove the bullets and create and alter bullet wounds to make it look as if the shots came from the rear, eliminate the need for this mission impossible by simply using Oswald’s rifle (that they had stolen) to fire the deadly shots from the rear—from a different window at the Book Depository Building than where Oswald was, or from the Dallas County Records Building on Houston Street? Lifton, who struggles mightily to convince his readers of the logic of his theory, knows he can’t answer that question sensibly, as he comes up with one sentence in his entire book that has no logic behind it, and he hopes the reader will gloss over it and not realize he hasn’t answered the question. He says the problem with firing Oswald’s rifle from the rear is that “more than one assassin would almost certainly be required to accomplish the assassination with precision because of numerous unpredictable factors: the position of bystanders, the president’s posture, etc.”5 Of course, not only is this unresponsive and no answer to the question, but additionally, his assertion itself makes no sense.

  Lifton did an enormous amount of thorough and meticulous research over a fifteen-year period (1964–1980) to prove his mad proposition—that conspirators had altered the president’s wounds before the autopsy. And miraculously, in his religious zeal and diligence, he actually found, like manna from heaven, evidence to support his theory. That evidence, the centerpiece of his fantasy, was found in a November 26, 1963, FBI document titled “Autopsy of Body of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy” written by FBI special agents Francis O’Neill Jr. and James W. Sibert.6 On November 22, O’Neill and Sibert had been dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, to meet Air Force One as it arrived from Dallas with the president’s body. At Andrews, they received further instructions to accompany the body at all times, including during the motorcade from Andrews to Bethesda and during the autopsy. In their report, dictated four days later, they said on page 3, “It was ascertained that the President’s clothing had been removed and it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed, as well as surgery of the head area, namely in the top of the skull.”7 Inasmuch as there was no surgery to the president’s head at Parkland Hospital, Lifton had his smoking gun, the proof there was surgical tampering with the president’s head by conspirators somewhere between Parkland and Bethesda. Lifton breathlessly tells his readers about his elation upon discovering this language in O’Neill and Sibert’s report: “This was the missing piece of the puzzle…I was exhilarated, terrified…Before the coffin arrived in the Bethesda autopsy room, somebody had performed ‘surgery’ on President Kennedy’s corpse…The [president’s] head was thrust backward by the impact of a bullet from the front, yet the autopsy performed at Bethesda showed an impact from behind. Someone had altered the head. I could hardly believe what I had found.” He goes on to say, “The scene conjured up was unbelievable [You’re right on that point, Mr. Lifton, unbelievable meaning “not worthy of belief.”]—the lid of a coffin raised at some secret location, unknown hands on the body, tools brought to bear, cutting into the corpse of John F. Kennedy.”8
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br />   Before I elaborate on the impossibility of Lifton’s theory, let’s see what one of the FBI agents has to say about this entry in his report. In an October 24, 1978, affidavit to the HSCA, Agent James Sibert wrote, “When the body was first observed on the autopsy table, it was thought by the doctors that surgery had possibly been performed in the head area and such was reflected in my notes at the time. However, this was determined not to be correct following a detailed inspection.”9

  And in a 1999 telephone conversation from his retirement home in Fort Myers, Florida, Sibert told me that when the casket was opened in the autopsy room, “The president was wrapped in two sheets, one around his body, another sheet around his head.” He said the sheet around the head was “soaked in blood,” and when it was removed, Dr. Humes “almost immediately upon seeing the president’s head—this was before the autopsy—remarked that the president had a tracheotomy and surgery of the head area.”* When I asked Sibert what Humes was referring to when he used the word surgery, he said, “He was referring to the large portion of the president’s skull that was missing.” When I asked him why he was so sure of this, he replied, “Well, if you were there, it couldn’t have been more clear that that’s what he was talking about. He said this as soon as he saw the president’s head. He hadn’t looked close-up for any evidence of surgery to the head when he said this. I’m positive that’s what he was referring to.”10 (Indeed, in Sibert and O’Neill’s five-page report, twelve of the paragraphs pertain to the autopsy, and the “surgery” reference is the first observational entry in the very first paragraph about the autopsy. The tracheotomy and surgery references immediately follow the words “following the removal of the wrapping.”) And in a 2001 interview, O’Neill said essentially the same thing as Sibert, that “the doctors’” statement referring to surgery to the head area was made “immediately during a cursory examination…It was not an exam. First viewing, put it that way…I think that was before the washing of the head.”11